Exceedingly popular stories

Mr Rudyard Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills (London: Macmillan and Co pp. 310) have reached a third edition, but their place in literature is as yet undetermined. All uncritical and gregarious persons are now applauding so loudly that a mere sober critic who tried to explain that Mr Kipling really has some merits could scarcely be heard above the din unless he bawled in a way that endangered truth, while a good conscientious hiss is quite inaudible and scarcely safe. Yet a little corrective hissing is needed at parts of Mr Kipling's performances.

His mushroom popularity we believe, as a whole, to be wholesome and medicinal, for all his peculiarities are so many antidotes to the most approved poisons of modern fiction. Shunning tedious analysis of his characters, he gives simply the spoken results of their inward struggles, and that, too, in a form which is often epigrammatic, though often too elliptical to be understood. Besides, there is an air of somewhat cynical unimportance about all his little tragedies that is a bracing change from the commonplace storyteller's tacit assumption that the world will be a little dull when his dénouement is over. But though he is an effective medicine, we cannot quite look on Mr Kipling as a standard food.

He may do better now that he is clear of India, but his Plain Tales are painfully Anglo-Indian in their lack of freshness and enthusiasm, and in the omnipresence of the Anglo-Indian philosophy of making an easy living by leading an easy life. Somehow the sun seems to wither us English in India and to give us fresh colour in Australasia, and Mr Kipling reflects the process of deterioration as "Tasma" [the Tasmanian novelist Jesse Couvreur, author of Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill] reflects the improvement.

In his fear of gushing, the former will barely come within hailing distance of the great problems of life which we in England have worked out ad nauseam in our novels, while the Tasmanian lady goes at them with a vigour that makes them seem young. So far the former has pushed to its utmost possibilities a certain limited opportunity for literary performance, and if he will now chasten his smart style and enlarge his ground there is no reason why he should not write a good novel.